The disclosure relates generally to asset protection, and more specifically, to recording features of an asset that a client has paid for with a computer purchase and/or verifying entitlements to enabled features of the asset, while supporting removal of undesired features and redundancy mirroring for the enabled features.
In general, asset protection from illicit access, use, disclosure, alteration, destruction, and/or theft, resulting in loss to an organization, is a major concern in the information technology industry. An asset is any data, device, or other component of a computing environment that supports information-related activities, for example, hardware, software, and/or confidential information.
In current practice, an organization will purchase a computer system installation and pay for features that enable on-demand aspects of corresponding assets of the computer system installation (e.g., a pay as you go scheme). That is, the computer system installation is shipped with many features listed within a system-resident database, but those features only become available to the organization upon payment (e.g., by enabling or disabling features, the organization is granted more or less access to the asset corresponding to those enabled or disabled features). Further, because all available features are already present on the organization's computer system installation and because the organization only has access to the purchased features, a problem exists with protecting the system-resident database such that features that have not been purchased and/or that have been removed are not surreptitiously enabled and/or re-enabled.